The flag of North Korea. An evil regime.
Published: 10th Jan 2012
Geeks love a fab documentary. Some people will think that I’m rather sad when I say that you have to be doing something bloody extraordinary to find a greater buzz than when you finally source a good old doc’ after a hefty chunk of hours on the browse. Here was one that I really sunk my teeth into. A BBC documentary, Escaping North Korea, that I stumbled upon one recent very ordinary and lonesome Sunday afternoon. The kettle was busier than normal.
The gut-wrenching tales that were told throughout this programme inspired me to serialise it through my blog and share with others the difficulties North Korean people can face, having risked their own lives, when escaping north of the border and into China.
North Korea is the last of the world’s closed communist states. Over the years, natives suffering this evil regime have suffered famine and brutality. It is believed that millions have died, but no source can come up with an exact figure. Many more civilians would have starved to death if it were not for foreign aid, which to this day is still being filtered through. A fact with which their own government are not proud of and try to dismiss vehemently.
With North and South Korea still technically at war, it is an impossibility for members of the North to escape directly south of the border, meaning the thousands who attempt to escape have to risk their lives by crossing a heavily patrolled river on the Chinese/North Korean border. The majority of escapees are women and children.
Should they be fortunate enough to muster their way out of North Korea and into China, North Koreans will then have many difficulties to overcome. In China they have no refugee status and with no national identity they are not able to find themselves legitimate jobs. As a result most women end up earning a living in the thriving sex industry.
North Korea shares most of its borders with China.
Escaping North Korea primarily focused on two real life stories. One of those stories featured a woman called Mei, whom along with a group of fellow North Koreans made a treacherous ground journey from China to Thailand in order to seek help from the South Korean embassy there. However, it was the story of Guem Hee and her little boy Bo Song that really captured both my own and I’m surely every other viewers heart.
At the second time of asking Guem Hee was successful in escaping North Korea and had built a new life for herself and the adorable Bo Song in the city of Yanji in China. The first time she managed escaped she was eventually sent back to her homeland where North Korean officials murdered her unborn child by a deadly injection – because in North Korea it is illegal to give birth to a child who’s father is of a different nationality.
Guem Hee was one of the fortunate North Koreans who had managed to attain a fake Chinese national identity card and land herself a well paid job as a tour guide. Unfortunately her young child Bo Song had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a disorder that was effecting his movement. Because Bo Song has no national identity in China, he could not receive what we all take for granted such as free schooling and health care, for which the latter he required so badly.
With the help of Pastor Chun of the Durihana Missionary Church based in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, Guem Hee decided that she had no other option but to take a huge gamble and use a fake passport to take a flight out of China and into South Korea via Thailand whilst leaving her child in the hands of a family friend. This would allow her to declare to immigration in South Korea that she is an official defector from the North, fully-knowing that with their clearance it would allow her son Bo Song to receive the medical help he so greatly needed.
Months later Guem Hee was re-united with her little boy Bo Song at Seoul airport. A tearful moment which was captured on film towards the end of the documentary. Bo Song is now receiving the treatment he need and is learning to stand alone.
Pastor Chun Ki Won founded the Durihana mission, which has helped over 700 North Koreans escape to the South.
Synopsis
At this moment in time it would seem that the sole person helping these poor North Korean people is Pastor Chun. A wonderful human being who has risked his own life in order to help hundreds of North Koreans flee from China to South Korea so that they can have a better life for themselves and in some cases their children also.
Because the Chinese will not allow North Korean escapees to walk into the South Korean embassy in their country it means that these people have no other option to travel thousands of miles to alternative locations in order for them to announce to South Korean immigration that they are official defectors of the atrocious Northern regime.
Here’s my question to the Chinese government: do you not think that these poor people have suffered enough already? It’s well documented how terrible life is for the vast majority of the 25 million estimated population of North Korea, but yet when some of these people manage to find enough courage inside themselves to risk their own lives in escaping they then have little option but to live as second-class citizens in China. Disturbingly these North Koreans would rather have no identity and none of life’s privileges – freedom itself is more than they could have ever imagined back home.
It would be unfair of me to simply just vent my disgust towards the Chinese government because you do have to see it from their perspective too. With China being the sole escape route out of North Korea it puts them in a very difficult position, especially as historically China and North Korea have enjoyed close diplomatic relations. With North Korea being a fragile nation possessing nuclear weapons it’s in the best interest of the Chinese to have them ‘on-side’. If top brass in North Korea were ever to believe that China was supporting and aiding North Korean refugees and whisking them off to the very country that they utterly despise and are still officially at war with, then God only knows the consequence.
Something quite clearly needs to be done. It wouldn’t be too much to ask of the Chinese to provide a secretive safe house for fleeing North Koreans preferably based just past their border patrol and allowing South Korean embassy officials to visit on an as-and-when basis to ‘process’ these refugees who can then arrange safe-passage into South Korea – an affordable expense that the South Korean government would, I’m sure, be willing to cater for. This solution would in fact be beneficial from a Chinese perspective, it would mean they would have little or no North Korean refugees wandering their streets any longer.
These fellow human beings just want to live a normal life. They aren’t asking for much, just the basics, for which we all take for granted. Surely this is the very least that they deserve.
If you would like to watch the documentary Escaping North Korea then please see part one posted below.
Official R Pitcher 